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EditPlus Text Editor’s Encoding support

I am using Editplus from quite long time. I use it as it is fast and efficient in whatever it is capable of doing. It is lightweight. EditPlus has very good support of Unicode. It's encoding facility works very well. It can auto detect encoding of a file and use that encoding to read and save file. I am sharing some information about EditPlus text editor and how we can work with EditPlus when we work on different language and text than just plain English.I feel those who are not using EditPlus will also find this post useful.

For the client I am working on from past few years have web sites in Scandinavian languages and Japanese languages as well. Scandinavian language does not require much work related to encoding but still requires a little extra care than plain English text. Japanese language of course require UTF-8 encoding for it to work. These all has given quite a good experience to me about encoding. Encoding is an interesting subject. I found myself enthusiastic whenever I got trouble related to encoding.

EditPlus Encodings: Action you can take!

As I already said, that EditPlus text editor auto detect the file encoding at the time of file Open, you generally do not bother about the encoding you need for a file type. Few times it happens that EditPlus fails to recognize the file's encoding. In that case you can use Menu: Document -> File Encoding -> Change File Encoding …

You will get a selected encoding that is the encoding currently used for the document. Select your desired file encoding from the drop down and save the document. Now your document encoding has changed.

At the time of saving a document you may get a warning that the document contains characters that can be lost in current encoding. At this point you come to know that you need different encoding or you have some encoding that is not required! Suppose your document is in ISO-8859-1 and you have used Euro sign (€) in document that does not come in ISO-8859-1 then you need to either delete the euro sign or replace the euro symbol with html entities/character encoding. If your document need to be represented in ISO-8859-1 then your only option is to use HTML entities (&euro;) or numeric character reference (&#128;). Similar problem occur if your document has curly quotes from window. Those characters () are not included in ISO-8859-1 character set. You decide your document's character encoding using header() in PHP (server side) or using meta tag in HTML.

So, this way you got a hint of characters not available/supported in an encoding.

Sometimes text editor may get back the lost characters in an editors but not always. I saw document used as a ASCII when saved in UTF-8 does not worked well when saves again as ASCII. This seems natural problem and not particularly an EditPlus problem!